A7 sanctions evasion network moved $6.9bn through global banks

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A7 sanctions evasion network

Highlights

A7 sanctions evasion network moved $6.9 billion through global banks from late 2024 to August 2025 using document forgery and shell entities.
Standard Chartered in Hong Kong received $1.1 billion, DBS $273 million, and Citigroup clients $74 million from A7-linked entities, with large flows ultimately reaching Chinese bank accounts.
Leaked files reveal large-scale use of counterfeit paperwork and relabeling of restricted goods, exposing significant anti-money laundering vulnerabilities in correspondent banking.

Leak outlines payment routes and bank exposure

As first reported by the Financial Times, hundreds of thousands of internal A7 files show the network used document forgery and shell entities to access the global banking system despite sanctions on Russia.

The records indicate that accounts held at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong received $1.1 billion from A7-linked entities between late 2024, when A7 was established, and August 2025. Over the same period, DBS in Hong Kong received $273 million and Citigroup clients received $74 million, while clients of Deutsche Bank in Europe received about $18 million.

A7 also opened accounts at First Abu Dhabi Bank for 17 different entities that made more than $1.8 billion of outbound payments. The group also opened accounts at JPMorgan Chase and DBS, according to the leaked material.

A7 was set up in Russia and Kyrgyzstan by Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor with support from Promsvyazbank, or PSB, a state-owned lender closely linked to the defence industry. The Kremlin presents A7 as a flagship cross-border payments provider for imports, and Shor told Russian state news agency Tass in July that the system is "immune to sanctions."

Forgery methods and wider industry risks

The leaked files describe a payment model in which front companies arrange cash deposits at banks inside the Swift network, allowing bills abroad to be settled for Russian companies. Chinese bank accounts are the final destination for just over half of the flows covered by the documents.

The material shows A7 built a large-scale forgery operation to defeat anti-money laundering checks. Staff prepared counterfeit invoices, maintained a library of thousands of corporate stamps and instructed front companies to describe goods in ways less likely to trigger sanctions alerts, including replacing customs codes for restricted items with nearby unrestricted alternatives.

One internal discussion concerns a February 2025 payment that was in fact for 500 night-vision scopes worth Rmb3.6 million, or about $510,000, for a Russian client. Staff had already created false paperwork describing the order as toughened glass and also discussed whether to relabel the goods as footwear, while trying to remove what they called "Russian trace" from documents.

In another case, payments totaling 1.8 million euros moved from Dubai Islamic Bank to Banque Misr from Solara Rise, an A7 front in the UAE. Supporting paperwork would have shown simple electronics such as more than 1,000 power adapters, but the real invoice was for two CNC machines, metal-machining devices needed by Russia's defence industry.

A7 initially routed large payment volumes through Kyrgyz banks including Eldik, Aiyl and Eurasian Savings Bank. The files show Standard Chartered raised suspicions in February 2025 and A7-linked recipients at the bank were soon closed, after which the network shifted more activity through the UAE, where further anti-money laundering queries were met with false invoices.

Zach Tvarozna, a former U.S. government banking analyst who wrote an earlier report on A7 for the Open Source Centre, said the new data show the network is far larger than previously understood. He said the material should force a reassessment of how difficult it is to keep traditional correspondent banking clean.

Our earlier article on U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s planned rules explained how U.S. trade enforcement is set to expand, with deeper supply-chain examinations aimed at uncovering fraudulent origin claims. We noted that the shift raises compliance and legal risks for brokers and other intermediaries as documentation requirements grow and overlap with other U.S. and EU controls, increasing operational friction across global supply chains.

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